Poor performance of ExtremePro 240GB

I recently purchased an ExtremePro 240Gb. The computer it's going in is an ASUS P5B deluxe. The drive is plugged into a 6Gb/s SATA card (a Rocket 620A Dual Port PCI-Express adapter). This adapter is plugged into a PCI-ex4 slot. The BIOS is using AHCI mode for SATA disks. I run Gentoo linux.

I have formatted the SSD into two Ext4 partitions (one 64Mb and the other is the remaining). Hdparm reveals this:

Re: Poor performance of ExtremePro 240GB

The reason I'm using a PCIe adapter for SATA is that it's 6Gb/s while the build in SATA on the motherboard is only 3Gb/s. I will try the SSD on the motherboard SATA headers to see if it makes a difference, but I can't see it being any faster.

The relevant specs for this computer are:

ASUS P5B deluxe

Processor: Intel QX6700 (quad core 2.6GHz)6Gb 800MHz SDRAM

PCIe card: Highpoint Rocket 620A plugged into a PCIe-x4 port, though it's only a x1 card.

I have not installed any specific drivers for this drive or the controller. It just works. I am using an Ext4 filesystem on the SSD, though that shouldn't be relevant to the speed test as that's done on the drive itself, not the partition.

Re: Poor performance of ExtremePro 240GB

There are variety of reasons of a performance drop, is your PCIe port NVMe or SATA ? If you connect a SATA device to PCIe port with an adaptor, there's no gurantee of the performance you will be getting, because the product is not designed to work that way, and I have no idea what the adaptor does during transfering signal, so my suggestion would be find a SATAIII port and re-test about speed.

I understand the drive works under your current driver, but drivers may cause the drive is not up to full speed too, that's the reason I want you to update the drivers

Re: Poor performance of ExtremePro 240GB

The motherboard is quite old so doesn't have NVMe support. The M/B doesn't have any SATA3 headers, they are all SATA2 (this is the reason for the PCIe SATA3 adapter). The SATA adapter has native support in Linux, no additional drivers are necessary. I know this from here:

About discard - after some extensive reading which I did today after getting my Extreme Pro 480GB, I figured out it's actually not a good idea, because Linux kernel doesn't implement it efficiently (and it was never fixed as far as I know).

The kernel implementation of realtime trim in 11.2, 11.3, and 11.4 is not optimized. The spec. calls for trim supporting a vectorized list of trim ranges, but as of kernel 3.0 trim is only invoked by the kernel with a single discard / trim range and with current mid 2011 SSDs this has proven to cause a performance degradation instead of a performance increase. There are few reasons to use the kernels realtime discard support with pre-3.1 kernels. It is not known when the kernels discard functionality will be optimized to work beneficially with current generation SSDs.